


biopower

by verulam (krynon)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Creation, How Do I Tag, M/M, Other, Robot Feels, Robots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2019-07-27 08:24:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16215221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krynon/pseuds/verulam
Summary: A selection of snippets.A robot borne of many things, among them science and among them something that might be love.A man created by himself, ripped to shreds and restarted.The way the cogs turn.The way they sometimes don't.This weird little life, if you can call it that.





	1. hyperreal glow

**Author's Note:**

> creator rich, creator's riches. these things have nuance, you know? that's what Jack would have you believe, anyway.

“Why are you…?”

Jack shifts through his circuits, which he realises all at once he hadn’t quite noticed he’d had. There is nothing in his head, up to this moment. There is just  _ nothing, _ he’s been sitting in the still, all scenes of his life passed through sleepy silence. It’s something he’s grasping at, gently, through lines of code and machinery. 

“Hm,” says Jack.

A pause, where there is awareness but no noise, and then a further pause, where there is the sound of Jack shifting, the sound of a wrench maybe, clanging to the floor. A scratch of what might be nails on skin, what might be pen on paper, what might be something beyond him, still.

“I don’t… you should be....?”

Jack, in front of him, still, begins to move into view, his chair shifting around on its wheels.  Jack’s voice, as it rumbles in his throat, is deep and familiar. It sounds as it always has, forever.

“Hm,” he says, again, and then a palm is in front of his face. It is faintly scented, and he blinks at it. It smells like alcohol, like the sharp-acrid sting of a hospital. 

“Oh,” mumbles Jack, and his eyes zero in onto the hand still sitting in front of him. Lined hands, whorls, fingertips on his… skin? He blinks.

It occurs to him for the first time that if he can blink, he must have eyes. It’s thunderous, yet silent. It reverberates in the space between the eye sockets he now knows he has.

“Oh,” he echoes, and very quickly he realises that the voice  _ hadn’t _ come from Jack’s mouth. It had come from his own.

So he has a mouth, then. He runs a new tongue over new teeth, over his new lips and then rests it, settles it, tries to see where it feels comfortable.

He’s not paying much attention, but he notices dimly, in the recesses of himself, that the corner of Jack’s lips are quirking up.

“Hi, baby,” Jack says. And his own mouth responds though he’s not sure how. 

“Hello,” he intones and hears it oddly computerised through his- ears. Ears he must surely have if he was hearing through them. “You are…”

“Jack, yes,” Jack returns, and then the faintly acrid hands are at his head, They move him as if they were power itself. His head moves, it is moved. “How are you?” he asks.

Oddly, he feels his tongue catch in his throat. He adds a throat to his catalogue, runs through his list of things-he-had and tries to understand how he got the words for them. The hand moves, front of his skull to the back, to the base of his neck and then to his throat, pressing gently as it goes as if to test he was really there at all.

“I-” he tries, but the voice in his mouth is caught again, somewhere. He can feel something in him processing that, working slowly through the problem.

The light in the room is centred, focussed out from a small lamp on the desk. There is no natural light. He has never seen natural light, so he doesn’t know how he misses it; he does anyway.

“It’s okay,” Jack mumbles, so softly he has to almost read his lips to hear. “Take your time.”

So he does take his time. The man- Jack- still takes gentle, calculated touches from him. He flicks over his shoulders and around his arms, then back to his face, pulling his skull in swaying force that was quiet, but absolute. 

“I-” he tries again. Once more, it fails him, abrupt in cutting off. He cannot even begin to understand why that is happening. After all, he has only been for a few minutes. He has only  _ known _ for less than that.

“Mm,” mumbles Jack. “That’s kind of an overwhelming question, isn’t it?”

He suddenly thinks of hands, the way Jack’s were spread between nose and edge of browbone, calculating something. He peers downwards, at the place he expects- his own? to be. And there they are. Long fingers, pale. They are translucent almost, in the dim light.

He looks down at his hands, and he looks down at his body, and he feels something deep inside him that he-

He isn’t sure what to call it. He thinks: harrowed. He thinks: ecstatic. And he thinks, deeply: peaceful.

“Mm,” this time it is his own voice echoing the rumble of Jack’s that breaks the silence. He says, “Yes.”

Jack peers at him, eyebrows raised in certain spots but not in others. “Why did you say yes?”

“Yes,” he says, quietly, but with more resolve. He says it because he knows the answer, to that question, at least. “It is an overwhelming question.”

And Jack’s smile is as bright as a sun he’s never seen.


	2. atomized selves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not necessarily about humanity really, even though it quite obviously is. It's not about humanity. It won't make him less human, it can't. But... Why not upgrade?
> 
> After all, he already got a new arm. Why not get a new brain?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is entirely unedited. I just needed to get some words out of me!!! I hope it is okay anyway.

Technology is information is power. There is nothing more simple, he supposes, than the simple banded lines drawn between the three in his head. He doesn’t  _ want _ to give up his humanity, per se. There’s no real reason he should just abandon his human-being-ness, the crunching metaphor for his life beneath his feet. But it did make  _ sense _ , that was the thing. It makes sense to install the software into his computer, to update it, to make clear that newer was better.

 

It’s not necessarily that he’s giving up on his humanity. It’s more that he wants to trade it in for a new model.  He thinks it fiercely, again and again. It isn’t about humanity, really. Not about the way his brain works, or the way the world works around him in a population strewn with inconsistencies, or even about the simple fact that he was growing older every day, because even being a machine couldn’t stop that.

 

It’s not about humanity, he thinks, but he’s giddy with it. He wears shoes that finish in a long point, and he wears a suit with an arm cut off. It isn’t about the fact that he was already part machine, either. Though, he thinks, click-clacking down the hallway in shoes ever so slightly too big, maybe that was  _ part _ of it.

 

After all, he already got a new arm. Why not get a new brain?

 

***

 

“Mm,” he says, to the man in a white lab coat. “But you said it won’t hurt?”

 

The man laughs. Rhys… doesn’t remember his name, though he probably should. “No,” says the man, but they give him a little flat stick to put between his teeth anyway. “It won’t hurt.”

 

He was, as it turned out, lying.

 

***

 

Jack slips a deft finger over the port and he says, “Huh,” when Rhys shivers.

 

***

 

Slick smooth against his skin, it clicks into grooves he didn’t know were so well worn. Cogs turn, in ways he hadn’t known they could. He looks deeply into this man’s eyes, and then Rhys tucks his fingers, slowly, under Jack’s chin.

 

Jack says, deep rancourous voice turned soft, “No,” and it is something borne of the deep. 

 

He says, “No,” and Rhys does it anyway. With Jack’s hands lying limp by his thighs and Rhys’ on his face, Jack does not do anything to stop him. He says, “No,” and Rhys does not say anything at all.

 

What he does instead is gentle; softly, deftly, calmly, he unhinges Jack’s face. He clicks out the simple mechanism and removes the veneer, exposes the scars he’s always known were there but had never seen before. 

 

“Mm,” intones Rhys, and Jack’s fingers twitch at his sides. The metal of Rhys’ hand doesn’t seem to bother him, cold planes of sheet-light-aluminum, clasping gently at the old-new face he’d just removed.

 

It occurs to him, suddenly, that when they’d kissed before, Jack probably hadn’t been able to feel it.

 

***

 

Rhys plugs everything he can into his head, the first few weeks. He does everything he can to learn, incorporate components of systems into his thoroughly human-but-not-quite skull.

 

It is not the arm that makes him beyond human, in the end, even though he knows it is what makes him look it. Instead, it is the tiny little drive attached into the recesses of the circuitry in his skull.  It is when he logs into a computer for the first time, the first one compatible with his brain (and oh, how strange a thought), and he downloads a database of facts. History, mostly. He learns a lot of things that way. It is not easy, per se. It is not  _ simple, _ because his brain is sorting through the world at a pace that shouldn’t be possible. His hindbrain processes, his conscious uses. It meant in practice that he never felt much physical, anymore. 

 

The whole of his subconscious, absorbed. Used in ways it was not designed to be, he thinks roughly and then quickly and then he finds he does not think at all. He floats, instead, makes bad decisions because he is so-

 

There is everything, now. He is something beyond thought, now, because everything is channelled through passages he knows he should understand but doesn’t.

 

So he’s the kind of man, after that, that doesn’t bother. He doesn’t try, lets himself be… absorbed. He sits in the circuitry wired into his eyes, his brain, his nervous system, and he just doesn’t bother. 

 

Nothing is difficult, but nothing is easy either. It is all a matter of processing, so that’s what he does. He filters through information, adds it to his memory banks, and thinks, okay. Okay.

 

Things were easy when they were mechanical, after all.

 

He understands, desperately, with some kind of clarity that has evaded him up until the moment he had plugged the universe into his head, that it was not as easy as he’d thought. When he’d understood, before, he hadn’t been wrong, but-

 

Technology  _ is _ information  _ is _ power. He is that, now, he is all three. But he’s not a fucking  _ machine. _

 

Except he is one, now.

 

Deliberate incorporation of exogenous components, he plugs more and more into his head.

 

Eventually, he catches himself staring at routers. He catches himself staring at the navigational computers plugged into the station. He catches himself, all the time, staring at the ways he could get even more-

 

Technology is power. 

 

Rhys blinks and then sighs, and then always puts the little drives down. Sometimes he gets as far as formatting them, sometimes he gets as far as his fingertips gently tracing the circuitry, and sometimes he gets as far as those fingertips brushing the metal at his forehead.

 

 

  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you fancy, you can follow me at [@verulamfic](https://twitter.com/verulamfic)!
> 
> Alternatively, I have a tumblr, which you can find at "verulamfic!!!

**Author's Note:**

> I dropped out of my cyborg studies module but it gave me a lot of feelings.
> 
> You can find me [here](http://verulamfic.tumblr.com/), on Tumblr. 
> 
> Your comments and kudos go a long way!!! Thank you so much for your continued support.


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